P A I N I U M D I S A S T E R------------------------------------by Anvil Soft 1996-2001(CRUOR)GAME DESIGN Ralf Zenker, Roland WendtRAYTRACING Lucas WendlerPROGRAMMING Ralf ZenkerGRAPHICS Ronald WendtMUSIC Martin Kleinhenz
Now, this is a game we all considered lost in the depth of the odd and twisted
history of the Falcon, now all of a sudden, it is being released, for free.
So grab your modem, pray for a reliable connection and download roughly 6 MB
of vertical-scrolling shoot'em up game, that has been wandering so many PD
libraries as a preview and so many mailboxes and FTP-sites as a rumour.
What was Painium Disaster about ?
Oddly enough, the README-File that comes with it doesn't tell. I vagualy
remember it was about a new microprocessor named "PAINIUM" that went all
mad and threatened the whole universe.
But it doesn't say anywhere in the game or the files that come with it so I
guess it doesn't matter really. How often did Der Komtur and I blast all the
levels of Lethal Xcess without knowing what the game is about either.
Starting
You need a Falcon030 for this game, RGB or VGA and at least 3.8 MB of free
memory. According to ST Survivor you also need a Jaguar Pad. There is an
option named "Joystick", but according to STS, this doesn't really work.
You of course also need some space on your harddisk, Painium Disaster
occupies roughly 11 MB on it.
What i soon found out is that you also need to start the game in a Falcon-
resolution and not an ST-compatible one.
Around the game
The game starts with something game programmers today call "FMV" - full
motion video. Yes, the first thing you see, besides a funky rendered
Anvil Soft logo is a nicely rendered animation that displays a space-
craft running through a technical environment, finally planting a little
rocket on a very critical target.
Right after that, you get the main-menu, accompanied by some music. The
menu lists the options:
Overscan - Turns Overscan mode on TV/RGB off or onJoystick - This toggles Joystick/Joypad controlHighscore - Displays the highscore screenCredits - A little screen featuring the creditsQuit - Leaves the gameStart - Starts the game
The menu behaves rather slowish so don't get confused if it doesn't seem to
react, just be patient for a while. If you finally decided to select Start
you are now presented a character-selection screen. Yes, indeed, there are 4
characters to chose from and all of them feature their special abilities
besides a funky Manga-like - and very colourful - snapshot of the person's
face. If you read through the special abilities and decided for a certain
character, you are once again presented a nice "FMV", this time of your
spacecract taking off, leaving the space-station and a picture of the planet
you are now heading for.
The game
Like said in the introduction, this game is a classical vertical scrolling
shoot'em up game, meaning : You see your ship, the enemies and the landscape
from above while the landscape moves from the upper part of the screen slowly
downwards. The little game panel, the number of remaining ships, smart-bombs
and the energy bar of your ship are not enclosed in a certain window but are
directly displayed on the screen, giving you basically a full screen of action.
Pressing the direction-pad on your joypad makes your ship move, pressing the
B-Button makes it fire standard armament. The C-Button fires a missile, if your
ship is equipped with one, the A-Button launches a smart-bomb, if you own one.
And that's basically all there is to know. Move, ditch, shoot and survive.
There are both airborne targets - the majority - that can be hit and eliminated
with the standard weapon (Button B), there are also ground targets that can
only be eliminated with missiles.
From time to time you encounter a very big sprite - a boss. There are, like in
Xenon 2, in-between bosses that might as well wander off screen if you do not
take them out, then there are the level-end bosses that means business : It's
either you or him.
You start with 3 ships in reserve and the minimum armament displayed on the
character selection screen. You can however expand your weaponary by collection
coloured bonus-objects that change or advance your main armament. The system is
the same as in Lethal Xcess or Wings of Death, meaning : If you want to
expand your weapon, you have to collect bonus- objects of the same colour/type.
If you do, you reach several stages of this armament. If you collect a
different colour, you are automatically back to level 1 of this type of weapon.
The colour codes for the bonus-objects are:
Red = FIRE
Green = LASER
BLUE = PROTON
Purple = MISSILE
Light blue = SMARTBOMB
Yellow = ENERGY (increases your energy)
Grey = OHNO (This symbolizes the man himself, yes death is around.
Try to avoid this one, decreases your speed, firepower or
energy)
Turquoise = LIFE (you get a extra life, for free)
Pink = SPEED (increases the speed of your ship)
If you wasted all 3 of your reserve ships, the game-screen is being removed to
display a game-over logo which then again vanishes for the high-score screen.
Oh yes, and pausing the game enables you to alter sound-settings like seen in
many Jaguar-games : You can toggle music and sound EFX volume. Funny enough,
the music volume is turned to 0 so the first impression you have is that there
is no music - There is, you can turn it on this way.
The other screens
The high score screen is a table of high-scores accompanied by a very fluent
moving star-field known from the Lethal Xcess -high score table. The Credits
screen is a colourful horizontal scrolline that swings up and down, featuring a
mirrored copy right beneath it, a vertically stretched copy of it above it and
a little Anvil-Soft logo hovering under it, swinging just in the same pattern
as the scroller does. Quit does as promised, no big surprises here.
Overscan however stays untested from my side since I cannot access a TV set
currently.
Note of STS : I could only test the game and no play it but I tried this optionwhich allows TV users to extent the game window to its fullest size. Nice !SummaryPainium Disaster has, according to the readme-file, been finished in 1997 and
just resided on someone's desks until now before it finally got released as
freeware. It is known to still have a _few_ _slight_ bugs, none of which I
encountered. I did see a slight bug in the left screen management, but this is
anything but serious.
So let's have a closer look at all the details. First of course it is very nice
that the demo runs on a 4 MB Falcon and does not require any additions, on the
contrary - using a speeder might mean trouble when running the game. It is also
very nice that the game can live with both RGB and VGA monitors, running
basically "full screen" on both of them. This enables all Falcon-users to play
this game without a minority being locked out again.
Then again, if ST Survivor's problems with the joystick persist, you do need
a Jaguar PowerPad to play the game, which again makes it impossible for a few
people to play the game.
Technically, there is hardly anything to criticize about the game. The
video-sequences play nicely, there is a massive amount of sprites on screen,
the scrolling is fluent and quite slick, so do the controls react. There are
neither long loading-times nor large breakes. The surrounding code, like the
main menu or the credits, is nothing to get wild about, but they are nice and
do their job well - except for maybe the slowness of the menu.
The graphics are good and colourful - and this where we run into the first
problem. On the one hand, the rendered animations look terribly good, but they
hardly match the colourful Manga-style of the other graphics - which are good
in their own, but different way. Then again, the relatively bright background-
and landscape graphics through the game often enough mask the enemy bullets,
which are usually plain white, making it hard sometimes to ditch them. The
sprites are looking nice and fit the colourful landscape graphics very well,
but they are not very variable and not very innovative either.
Don't get me wrong, they do their job well, but they are nothing to get really
wild about either. The music is - first of all - hidden. The menus, the first
FMV and the high score screen always have music, but to have music in the game,
you need to pause first. The music is of good replay quality and features some
kind of a techno-rave beat (like of the early to mid-90s) and it underlines the
gameplay well, not distractingly well, but well. Don't get me wrong, the music
is not bad at all, i like it, but it is nothing to get wild about either. The
sound effects are of lower quality and they are very low in volume. If you turn
on the music and set the volume to 100%, you will hardly notice sound effects
anymore. If you want the sound effects to overlay the music, you have to turn
the music-volume to roughly 20%, otherwise the music will dominate. Most of the
sound-effects are simple BOOM- and BANG! noises with just a few spoken samples
- like the announcement of the bonus-object you just collected.
So don't get me wrong, the sound effects suit the game well, but they are
nothing to get wild about either.
Obviously, the designers of the game did a lot of research on success- full
vertical scrolling shoot'em ups. The character selection screen reminds of
Zalor Mercenary on the Atari Lynx, the extra-weapon system matches the one
from Wings of Death or Lethal Xcess, however without matching the
innovative weapons themselves : You always have a primary weapon that shoots
bullets, missiles and if you're lucky a smart-bomb. Extraordinary weapons like
the static ray in Lethal Xcess or one very weak bullet that has to travel to
the middle of the screen to explode into 3, 4 or 5 large bullets are missing in
Painium Desaster.
The high score table is a direct import from Lethal Xcess and so is the
system of having more than 1 ship PLUS an energy bar for all of them.
Unfortunately, the genius of Wings of Death or Lethal Xcess stays
unmatched. The enemy formations are rather simple and remind rather of the
classic Jupiter Probe than of the ingenious and devilish enemy movement of
Wings of Death or Lethal Xcess - The patterns of the enemy sprites are a
bit simple and even the bosses tend to move a bit uninspired. Besides that,
there seem to be no "critical spots" in any of the enemies, neither in the
simple ones nor in the bosses - Just hitting them seems to be sufficient to
kill them. And just by the way, no enemy that requires to be hit several times
signals a hit by flashing white as it is done in many shoot'em up games
nowadays.
Then again, you have also ground targets, like you have in Xevious . In
Xevious however you did not need to "collect" a missile power-up to eliminate
the ground-based targets which you have to do (if playing with one of the first
two characters) in Painium Disaster . However, there are areas where you
desparately need the missiles to survive and yet the missile moves relatively
slow, you are only granted one or two per screen and if you miss a ground-based
target, you usually have to wait quite a while to fire again - which usually
implies massive loss of energy or a life. Even worse that most of the bullets
fired by ground-based targets move quite quickly all over the screen and not
just vertically downwards like the bullets of the airborne enemies do, making
it even more difficult to ditch them in front of bright background patterns.
And if you do not have a missile out of various reasons, you are then really in
trouble because you cannot stop the cannons from firing either.
Mentioning the firing of the enemies, it is also kind of unusual that you are -
from the beginning on - confronted with more enemies than the relatively weak
equipment you start with can handle. Of course there is no need to shoot every
enemy since you only need to stay alive until you reach the final boss of the
level, but having trouble right from the start in getting rid of the enemies on
screen is unusual - basically every shoot'em up game I know reserves such
situations for later levels. "Painium Disaster" has you resign relatively
quickly in your attempt to battle all enemies on screen to collect the
precious power-ups, making you rather ditch than fight the enemies.
So, putting all the pieces together of this review, Painium Disaster is
without a doubt a good game - but unfortunately also a game in which the
details a game consists of do not match perfectly. That begins with the
graphics that stand in contrast to the style the video-sequences are kept in.
That continues with the too bright background patterns that camouflage the
bullets a little and thus interfere with the game a little.
It also holds for the music which goes nicely with the game but cannot push the
player in a way that for example the soundtrack of Wings of Death does. It
is also true for the game itself, in which all basics for a good shoot'em up
game, fluent scrolling, many sprites, slick controls, large amount of enemies,
intelligent power-up system, variance of weapons and ground- and air-borne
targets, are easily met while the details are not, enemies too stabile, moving
patterns and formations too simple, armament to battle ground-based targets
weak and not automatically supplied etc.
Now for a freeware game, Painium Disaster stays a cracker for sure. It is fun
to play, it bears 4 levels for you to get into, different weapons, music, sound
effects, speech, excellent rendered intro sequences, overscan full-screen
scrolling, slick controls and all that for just 11 MB on your harddisk and a
6 MB download.
But then again, it is nowhere near Wings of Death or Lethal Xcess which can
be considered the masterpieces of vertical scrolling mayhem on the Atari ST.
Painium Disaster easily resides among games like Jupiter Patrol or ZarlorMercenary, it clearly beats games like Slap Fight or Crescent Galaxy (even
though this is a horizontal scroller) or the Falcon version of Raiden.
So get it, as long as you can, you will not regret it, even though you will
surely not play it with the same fascination or dedication like you would play
Wings of Death . I am quite sure, if Painium Disaster had made it in time
and had been released around 1995, it would have been a very nice "first"
vertical scrolling shoot'em up game like Goldrunner or Jupiter Probe
had been when the Atari ST was young, with others following that would have
then been compared with Painium Disaster.
This way, Painium Disaster today still is a good game, but it does not hold
up to what many people have expected.
Well, off to play another round ...
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The Paranoid
Paranoia of the Lunatic Asylum
Think you can handle it ?!
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